Tracing artistic influence in circles: Laocoön and His Sons · 2:21am Apr 22nd, 2017
Funny story...
There's a terribly famous and influential ancient Roman statue called Laocoön and His Sons, thought by some to be the greatest sculpture of the ancient world.
It's based on a strange episode in Trojan War, one which is in the Aeneid and several other places, but not in the Iliad. The priest Laocoön warned the Trojans not to take the big horse into the city. Then a giant serpent came out of the sea and killed him and his sons. What's odd is that there are several versions of the story. Sometimes he's a priest of Apollo and sometimes of Poseidon; sometimes the serpent kills Laocoön and his sons, and sometimes just his sons; sometimes a different god sent the serpent; sometimes it kills Laocoön as punishment, sometimes unjustly.
The fig leaves are not original
When I saw this photo, my first thought was, "Is that really Roman? It looks more like a scene Raphael would paint, with all the bent necks and outstretched arms."
The statue was described, vaguely, by Pliny the Elder, but not found until 1506, when the Italian gentleman Felice de Fredis found it buried in his vineyard. His vineyard just happened to be in Rome, near Pope Julius II, who happened to be a fanatic about art, especially ancient Greek and Roman art, and happened just then to be looking for some ancient sculpture to be the centerpiece for a little project he was putting together which he called the Vatican Museum.
So the Pope sent a sculptor who was working in the Vatican to check it out. The sculptor went and, together with a few other people, dug up the rest of the sculpture. He told the Pope that it was a famous statue from Rome, that it was very good and in surprisingly good shape, and he should buy it immediately.
So the Pope bought the sculpture, in exhange giving Felice de Fredis a job and paying him the income from the tolls of the Porta San Giovanni.
What's the Porta San Giovanni? Oh, that's this thing. One of the gates into Rome.
I'm not a Renaissance economist, but I'm pretty sure that was a high price for one sculpture.
The sculptor who dug it up had in the past conspired with an art dealer to sculpt a forgery of an ancient statue, bury it, and then sell it to a cardinal. His name was Michelangelo.
The Pope put it on display, but all the right arms were still missing. Wikipedia says,
According to Vasari, in about 1510 Bramante, the Pope's architect, held an informal contest among sculptors to make replacement right arms, which was judged by Raphael, and won by Jacopo Sansovino.[43] The winner, in the outstretched position, was used in copies but not attached to the original group, which remained as it was until 1532, when Giovanni Antonio Montorsoli, a pupil of Michelangelo, added his even more straight version of Laocoön's outstretched arm, which remained in place until modern times.
So... did the statue influence Michelangelo, or did Michelangelo make the statue and conspire with Felice de Fredis to sell it to the Pope? Did its bent necks and outstretched arms influence Raphael, or did Raphael (or Michelangelo) reconstruct it from its broken pieces with bent necks and outstretched arms? Perhaps most interesting--even if the statue was really Roman, would Michelangelo or Raphael know whether the statue they reconstructed influenced them more than they influenced the reconstruction of the statue?
This is a problem, because Laocoön and His Sons is one of the major pieces of evidence trotted out to show that modern European culture is a continuation of Greek and Roman culture. It could be that it isn't evidence of Roman influence at all. Or, it could (as far as I know) be that the statue is a copy of an earlier Greek statue.
This becomes a bigger problem when studying the history of Western thought, because a large fraction of important early philosophical or technological texts are either forgeries, written centuries later than they claim to have been or attributed to someone more politically acceptable than the person who really said them, or repetitions of something someone else said earlier.
Case in point: The development of real numbers, division, and trigonmetry
The question of whether Western science really descends from Greco-Roman culture, rather than having an equal part Middle Eastern ancestry, hangs partly on whether Ptolemy really copied some of the math in his Almagest (150 A.D.) from Hipparchus, a Greek who lived 300 years earlier (150 B.C.). The problems are
- that that math contained crucial new elements that were inconceivable within Greek and Roman metaphysics, notably approximate numerical measurements, division, and trigonometry, but that had been developed in Babylonia
- that no one else had mentioned any of it in the previous 300 years, and it's hard to believe Hipparchus invented these things by himself and never told anybody, and
- the astronomical data that Ptolemy said he got from Hipparchus matches the sky 200 years after Hipparchus.This is pointed out on pages 256-257 of an interesting old book called The Might of the West which makes an extended argument that many key aspects of Western culture came from the Levant rather than from Greece or Rome, including the use of real numbers. The astonishing importance of real numbers in creating the modern world is something I much hope to discuss, as it is a key part of the concept of rationalism versus empiricism, which is a key part of understanding why modernists and other people want to destroy Western culture.
A very intriguing idea...
"Sir, I'm sorry to tell you, your statue is a forgery. It's not Roman at all. Just a Michelangelo."
I want that income, just because.
Anyway, nice little philosophy you got going here. You keep making me think whenever I read your blogs. I think I like it, but I'm not sure.
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Shame if anything was to happen to it...
Hehe, great story, this kind of anecdotes are always the funnies part of history.
It isn’t standard explanation that 1) a lot of greek/rome came from ancient near east and 2) that both greek/rome knowledge and ancient near east (babylonian astronomy) came back to renaissance europe through the arabic world?
I would make sense that in the arab world both areas of knowledge (the ones developed by the greeks and the one developed by the ancient near east) would mix together and came as a “package” to the western culture (plus with their own things, like the arabic numbers).
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That happened after 1100 AD, but, yeah, that probably doesn't make a huge difference WRT the dispersion of knowledge. The book is more interested in cultural inheritance. It argues that the standard view is that the west took knowledge from the East, but that its culture came entirely through Rome, whereas the author thinks that many important aspects of Western culture came from Syria, Persia, and such areas. For instance, the Greeks and Romans had a great deal of sculpture but little interest in music; the Arab world had no sculpture but much music; Western culture has very little sculpture but an enormous emphasis on music.
My interest is more in how separable certain worldviews are. One of the sharpest divisions, it appears to me, between different ways of thinking, is between people who think only in integers--as in the ancient Greeks and the humanities today--and people who think in real numbers, as do scientists. It would be very interesting to me if the beginnings of real mathematics had been taken by Ptolemy from another society rather than developed within Greece, where the idea of the irrationals was considered a horror.
Real numbers didn't become really important until another key philosophical advance: the development of the decimal position in numerical representation. Before that, arithmetic was so clumsy that you couldn't have any kind of empirical science or statistics, because each computation took a lot of time. The decimal position wasn't invented until the 17th century! It seems so simple to us, but it was invented at the same time as logarithms, which seem much more complicated to me.
4505568 Well we can certainly trace the providence of the Mafia with this, if nothing else.
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As well as, er, the non-Roman parts of Europe, yes? Particularly, you know, the northern and western parts of Europe where the Roman writ ran thinnest?
I believe this came up like a year, year and a half ago when you were doing a series of posts about the literary inheritance of the English language, Bad Horse, and I'll say again what I did then because it is one of my hobby-horses: people talk all the time about the cultural inheritance of Rome but overlook the fact that Western Europe (and the attendant "Western Civilization" which usually includes North America) is as much or more Germanic than it is Roman. The kingdoms and peoples that would eventually become Germany, England, and France were either outright never conquered by Rome, or following the collapse of the Western empire were conquered by people who had never been conquered by Rome. The ruling classes of France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire nearly universally trace themselves back to people with names like Hugh, Alfred, and Lothair rather than Marcus or Lucius or Julius.
This isn't to deny the impact that Roman culture and learning had on Western Europe, of course. But the Roman center of gravity was in the southeast of Europe and also in what we'd today call the Middle East. The cultural inheritance of northern and western Europe isn't just guys with sandals, skirts, and gladiuses; it is guys with beards, bearskins, and axes. It is Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in addition to Euripides and Pliny the Elder.
I confess that what you're trying to say with this... metaphor? I think it's a metaphor?... escapes me.
4506908 I don't think the English, German, and French get overlooked, though. It's not my book anyway. Very interesting and insightful, but sometimes makes too much of its evidence, or substitutes "what everybody knows" for data.
I explained in my post on the Aryan heresy that they were conquered by people who had never been conquered by Rome, but who thought they were Roman. Which way you want to count that is up to you. You could say the whole period was a battle for Europe between three wannabe-Roman peoples.
It's not a metaphor. It will take, I think, four long posts to explain.